In the Picture

Gary Leonard doesn’t work nights anymore. Nearly two decades ago, the Los Angeles photographer, fueled by the desire to document almost everything that happened in the city, thought nothing of shooting from the morning until the next dawn, or at least until the beer at the after-after-hours club Zero Zero ran out.

Some of Leonard’s most enduring images were taken after the sun went down, in his capacity as the unofficial photographer for L.A.’s first generation of punk rock. While he may be best known for his work on the music scene--which is featured in the newly released “Make the Music Go Bang! The Early L.A. Punk Scene” (St. Martin’s Griffin)--shooting the clubs was only a small part of his oeuvre. “Los Angeles is his focus,” says Don Snowden, who edited the book’s collection of essays. “He has units in his artistic life, and the music scene is just one aspect of it.”

The 46-year-old photographer still roams around town with his camera bag, but now he does his work in the daytime. Be it a packed house at the Coliseum for a Promise Keepers rally, or Asian tourists in ridiculous sombreros strolling down Olvera Street, Leonard’s lens captures the eclectic heartbeat of a city with its absurdity intact. And nothing is sacred. “I shoot anything and everything,” says the unassuming photographer. “It’s just where I go. I’m like Cindy Sherman, but less obvious. She puts herself into her work. I’m invisible.”

He’s difficult to pick out in a crowd--he’s just another gray-haired guy in khakis and a flannel shirt--and he squirms uncomfortably speaking about his work or himself. He likes to let pictures do the talking, as in his popular weekly diary, “Take My Picture, Gary Leonard,” which began in 1993 in the Los Angeles Reader and now appears in the L.A. edition of New Times. Or in the broad spectrum of his photos, from Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon in San Clemente to O.J. and Nicole Simpson in Brentwood, archived at the Los Angeles Public Library.

“He took on the task that his decades in the city would not go unnoticed,” says Carolyn Kozo Cole, the library’s curator of photographs. “He has incredible photos of Los Angeles in the ‘70s, wonderfully documenting the young, fast and foolish. You name it.”

Leonard’s relationship with the library led to a grant to photograph Echo Park and Silver Lake. He doesn’t have far to go as he’s lived in the community more than half his life. “It’s all here in the neighborhood I live in,” Leonard says. “On top of the hill there are people like me. I drive down the street and there are gang guys, a little farther down are the Korean grocers, and at the bottom of the hill are the Buddhists and Echo Park lake.”

As an 8-year-old, Leonard first grasped the power of photography when he and his family drove from Encino to the Coliseum for Dodger photo day in 1959, where the aspiring snapper shot pictures of Dodger Manager Walter Alston and pitcher Don Drysdale. He later became a staff photographer for UCLA’s Daily Bruin and did freelance photography for newspapers and corporate concerns. But it was during the early days of L.A.’s punk scene that Leonard found a suitable milieu for his intimate, unfussy documentary images.

Like many movements fueled by drugs, alcohol and two-chord progressions, its participants thought they were changing the world, and it was a perfect fit for Leonard’s lifelong photo project. Bands like X, the Germs, the Blasters, the Plugz and Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs provided a frantic, sweaty soundtrack to the cultural revolution at dank venues like Club 88, Blackie’s and the Hong Kong Cafe.

The photographer’s candid shots provide the visual glue in “Make the Music Go Bang!” connecting a disparate, desperate cast of characters that managed to come together in the darkness. The most powerful images in the book underline the city’s strange contradictions, such as the late Darby Crash sharing a beer with a shellshocked USC frat boy after a frat house performance by his band, the Germs; or a bewildered Mayor Tom Bradley pressing the flesh with slovenly punk guitarist Carlos Guitarlos.

Leonard documented the scene--his pictures regularly appeared in the LA Weekly’s “La de da” column--but he wasn’t really a punk. At 27 when he started shooting at clubs, he was a decade older than many of his subjects, and he was something of a Forrest Gump in his ability to blend in. He was the one with the beard and V-neck sweater surrounded by mohawks and torn T-shirts. Nevertheless, he developed a bond with the musicians, to whom he freely gave away prints and contact sheets.

“I try to get as close as I can,” he says. “I didn’t want these people to be merely subjects.” It wasn’t long before Leonard became a full-fledged creature of the after-hours. “I had a lot of energy,” he says. “It took me more and more into the night.” Soon, he began to neglect other aspects of his life--like his daytime bill-paying gigs.

“I began to blow off everything. I was squeaking by any way I could,” he says. “I always wanted to reach bottom. I always wanted to know what it was.” He got his wish. Leonard’s health began to decline from the many sleepless nights and the excess. “I had a lifestyle that was the same as those I was shooting,” Leonard says.

By the mid-’80s, the scene had dissipated. Leonard, still living hard, turned away from photography and focused his creative energy on what he calls his personal “Watts Towers,” an assemblage of garbage--beds, bicycles and other discarded objects--in front of his Echo Park home. Many of his neighbors considered Leonard’s art project an eyesore; it was eventually disassembled, and Leonard moved elsewhere in Echo Park. Losing the house and the assemblage was a wake-up call, and Leonard rediscovered his camera. He became a staff photographer for the Downtown News, and became reacquainted with the city.

Leonard still tries to be everywhere at once, always with a camera--”Everywhere but when I go to sleep and when I go to the market,” he says. But these days, he’d rather hang out with the pols at City Hall than while the night away at Spaceland. “I’ve gotten older, I’ve changed,” he says. “I don’t even know about night life anymore. I go to movies.”

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* Leonard will appear tonight at 7 at Skylight Books, 1818 W. Vermont Ave.